Monday, July 28, 2014

Jeremiah's dirty underwear?! Daily Mass Homily--Monday, July 28th, 2014


            While revering Scripture in my personal and public prayer life, sometimes I have to chuckle at some of the passages.  Like today, for instance.  God compares Israel to dirty underwear!  (A loincloth was the regular undergarment for centuries.)
            Like many other prophets, Jeremiah was asked to do a symbolic prophecy in which he took off his loincloth (I hope he put something else on!) and buried it, per God’s instruction.  When he was told to dig it up later, naturally it was soiled.
            God provides us with a great image for sin.  Now I’ll move on from considering our unmentionables, but you all know how quickly our clothes get dirty.  I know my laundry piles up, especially my work out clothes which absolutely reek when I am done with exercising.  Now, consider babies.  They literally soil themselves from both ends!  Loving parents continue to clean and bathe their little ones who would otherwise live in filth.  This is what sin does to our soul.  It stinks and soils.  Whenever we sin, we have an mind a pleasure, desire or other supposed good.  Yet what we are really choosing is a smelly, soiled diaper.
            Keep this image in mind the next time you are tempted to sin.  And if you fall, present yourself to God to get washed up and forgiven.

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